Keywords Folklorists

In 1916 Barbeau set off on a recording expedition along the St Lawrence River, determined to refute the assumption that Ernest Gagnon, in his Chansons populaires du Canada (Quebec 1865), had published all the traditional French songs there were to be found. In this first investigation in the counties of Charlevoix and Chicoutimi he was able to gather, in notation and recordings, more than 500 songs and several folk legends - enough material to prove his point. An initial field trip among northwest coast Indians in 1914 was followed by many subsequent visits. Edward Sapir and Ernest MacMillan taught him how to set down folk tunes in musical notation. After 1910 and throughout the 1920s, Evelyn Bolduc, Gustave Lanctot, Adélard Lambert, and É.-Z. Massicotte were inspired largely by Barbeau. With Massicotte Barbeau established the Soirées du bon vieux temps in 1919, held at the Bibliothèque St-Sulpice (BN du Q). François Brassard, Luc Lacourcière, and Joseph-Thomas Leblanc were his principal disciples in the 1930s.

In 1918 Barbeau became president of the American Folklore Society, of which he had been a member since 1911. He became assistant-editor of the Journal of American Folklore starting in 1915 In 1916 he was elected to membership in the Royal Society of Canada, and in 1933 he became president of its francophone section; in 1950 he was named a Fellow. In 1917 he reconstituted the Canadian Society of Folklore in two divisions, so as to serve more effectively the separate needs of the provinces of Quebec and Ontario in the collection and preservation of their individual traditions.

On three occasions - 1925, 1929, 1945 - Barbeau received the Prix David for his literary works. In 1937 he was named president of the National Consulting Committee for the Protection of Canadian Wildlife. By 1939 he was a member of the Washington Academy of Sciences, the Canadian Authors Association, and the Société des écrivains canadiens. He gave his first series of courses in human geography at the University of Ottawa in 1942. In 1945 he joined the faculty of letters at Laval University, where in 1942 he had begun lecturing during the summer. (The Archives de folklore at Laval University had been established in 1944.) He retired from the National Museum in 1948 but kept up his private research; for many more years he devoted himself to the transcription and publication of the folk tunes and texts he had collected during his expeditions. He served 1956-63 as president of the CFMS (CSMT), which he also had helped to found. In 1946 he received the Parizeau Medal at the 14th congress of the Association canadienne-française pour l'avancement des sciences; in 1962, the Canada Council medal; in 1965, the University of Alberta National Award; and in 1968, the Diplôme d'honneur from the CCA. He was appointed a Companion of the Order of Canada in 1967. In 1963, on the French network of the CBC, he presented his reminiscences and findings in a series of eight programs called 'Le Rossignol y chante' for the 'Images du Canada' series. His interests were wide-ranging and covered not only music, folklore, and ethnology but also art in general - sculpture, architecture, embroidery, culinary arts, and painting. He also was interested in the origin and history of the west-coast Indians as revealed in their totem poles. In linguistics he revealed the relationship between the Huron and Iroquois languages. He contributed articles to many periodicals, among them La Revue canadienne, La Revue populaire, Scientific American, the Bulletin of the Geographical Society of Philadelphia, Le Canada français, Culture, La Revue de l'Université d'Ottawa, Journal of American Folklore, Saturday Night, the Beaver, and the Canadian Forum.

'A tireless seeker, he was the first to open up the field of scientific research in the realm of folklore' (Réginald Hamel et al, Dictionnaire pratique des auteurs québécois, Montreal 1976); that is, Barbeau was the first in Canada to document precisely the location and the date of collection and the singer's name for each song gathered; the first to transcribe the tunes in a precise manner and to comment on the structure, semantics, and prosody of the verse. He left 13,000 original texts and variants of Indian and French songs, 8000 with tunes. He transcribed in syllabic notation the lyrics of more than 3000 Indian songs and invented a system of notation for their music. Considering that he was virtually self-taught, his ability to transcribe the music recorded on his cylinders and to sing Indian songs authentically was remarkable.

Most of his papers can be found at the Salle Marius-Barbeau, in the Canadian Centre for Folk Culture Studies, a division of the Canadian Museum of Civilization, where new technologies are being used to preserve these documents; a collection is also held at the ANQ in Montreal. A branch of the municipal library of Laval, Que, and a primary school in Ottawa were named after Barbeau, as was a documentation center in Montreal of folk arts and traditions of Quebec and of international folklore, affiliated with the folk dance company Les Sortilèges. In 1969 the highest mountain in the Canadian Arctic was christened Barbeau peak, and in 1985, Montreal was given a Marius Barbeau street in the Rivière-des-Prairies district. The Marius-Barbeau Medal, established in 1985 by the Folklore Studies Association of Canada, has been awarded to Edith Butler, LaRena Clark, and Germain Lemieux, among others.

See also Folk music, Franco-Canadian

Barbeau, Marius
Barbeau was the founder of professional folklore studies in Canada and was one of the first collectors of folk songs (courtesy Library and Archives Canada/C-34447).

Writings
Marius Barbeau, 'How the folksongs of French Canada were discovered,' Canadian Geographical J, vol 49, Aug 1954

I Was a Pioneer (transcription of a 1965 interview with Laurence Nowry), National Museum Oracle, 43 (Ottawa 1982)

See also Bibliographies for Christmas; Ethnomusicology; Folk music; Folk music, Franco-Canadian; Native North Americans in Canada.

Author Renée Landry, Denise Ménard

Discography

My Life in Recording Canadian-Indian Folklore. 1957. Folk FG-3502

Bibliography

Savard, Félix-Antoine. 'Marius Barbeau et le folklore,' R de l'U Laval, vol 1, Nov 1946

Filmography

Marius Barbeau et le folklore canadien-français. NFB 1968

Links to Other Sites
Hommage à Marius Barbeau
Read the album notes for this CBC recording featuring a selection of songs collected by Marius Barbeau, including some of Québec’s most dominant figures in traditional music.

Marius Barbeau
This bi-lingual tribute to Marius Barbeau features comments by Helen Creighton, Kenneth Peacock, Graham George, Père Anselme Chiasson and Edith Fowke. From the Canadian Journal for Traditional Music.

My Life in Recording: Canadian-Indian Folklore
Listen to brief clips of Marius C. Barbeau discussing his collection of native Canadian songs and stories. From the Smithsonian Institution.

The Man with the Wooden Wife
Marius Barbeau’s version of a traditional folk tale from the Tsimsyan and the Tlingit peoples of British Columbia and Alaska.

Canadian Society for Traditional Music
Features a substantial online catalogue of Canadian folk and traditional music recordings and full text articles from the quarterly magazine "Canadian Folk Music."